Can You Be Friends At Work?
Episode 483 | Author: Emilie Aries
Where do you draw the line between work and play when it comes to office friendships?
We all know how difficult it can be to make friends as adults. Childcare responsibilities, conflicting work schedules, household chores—it’s so much harder to pursue and develop relationships when you can’t just meet at the mall every day after class. No wonder we get so excited when we meet someone awesome at work. Finally, shared experiences and built-in hangout time!
Lots of research supports the benefits of workplace friendships. Numerous Gallup polls have indicated that business besties are key to job success. People who are friendly with their coworkers are more likely to engage and innovate, be more productive, and have more fun.
Of course, making friends at work also comes with unique challenges, and keeping these potential conflicts in mind is important. In this episode, I cover some issues that could crop up and how the research suggests we navigate them as we nurture those cherished office friendships.
Two tips for being friends with a teammate
It’s wonderful to have work friends! Just keep a couple of things in mind as you explore these proven happiness-increasing relationships:
Be proactive about setting boundaries. Before there’s an awkward situation, have a chat about how you’ll navigate any serious work-related discussions. Maybe you agree to keep your work relationship separate from your friendship so that both can continue to thrive.
Make it about more than just work. Everyone needs to vent now and then, but if your friendship is nothing but griping about long hours, bad bosses, and stingy pay, it’s not much of a friendship. Talking about only work stuff gets even more tedious if one of you hopes to grow at the company and the other plans to move on. If you want to pursue this relationship beyond weekday lunches and sharing memes on Slack, make an effort to involve your work bestie in your life beyond the office, from double dates to dinner parties to movie nights.
Navigating a shift in power dynamics
I don’t need to tell you there’s a big difference between being friends with a teammate and being friends with someone above or below you in the company hierarchy.
Not surprisingly, some of the biggest challenges to work friendships stem from this inherent power imbalance. It might have been there from the start, or one of you got promoted after your friendship solidified. Either way, this imbalance means navigating a new relationship: the boss–employee one.
ResumeLab surveyed 1000 employees about this very phenomenon. Given that 44% of them reported that either they or their friend was promoted to manage the other, there’s a good chance this will happen to you one day if it hasn’t already.
The good news is that despite half of the respondents confirming they felt some jealousy over a work friend’s promotion, almost 70% said the friendship persisted (and 14% said it improved)!
The danger—arguably even more significant than losing the friendship—is the impact that handling such situations the wrong way could have on your career. If you’re the one who becomes your friend’s manager, you need to tread carefully, doing everything you can to avoid the appearance of playing favorites. Missteps here don’t just mess up your team. Research by the London School of Economics reported that they erode trust across the entire organization.
I get into this further in the episode, but here’s the main takeaway: if you manage people you consider friends, make sure you have your procedures for performance reviews and task allocation firmly in place so that your decisions are objective and fair. That’s the best bet for keeping your friendship, and your career, on track.
Let’s keep this conversation going. I want to hear how you navigate workplace friendships! If you’ve experienced a shift in power dynamics with a work bestie, head over to the Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn to fill us in on what happened and what that friendship looks like now.
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
Episode 329, Female Friendships: Why We Need Them and How to Keep Them
Episode 458, Establishing Your Personal and Professional Network in a New City
Stuff Mom Never Told You Episode 105, Can We Be Friends?
That Moment When One Friend Is Promoted—And The Other Is Not, Forbes
Does Organizational Cronyism Lead to Lower Employee Performance?, Frontiers in Psychology
Cronyism and Nepotism Are Bad for Everyone: The Research Evidence, Cambridge University
Workplace Friendships: the Double-Edged Sword, London School of Economics
What to Do When You Become Your Friend’s Boss, Harvard Business Review
Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective, Review of General Psychology
Social Undermining in the Workplace, Academy of Management Journal
Crossing The Line: Boundaries of Workplace Humour and Fun, Employee Relations
Why work friendships are critical for long-term happiness, CNBC
Should You Be Friends With Your Boss?, Forbes
The Increasing Importance of a Best Friend at Work
From BFF to Your Boss, ResumeLab
LEVEL UP: a Leadership Accelerator for Women on the Rise
Learn to LEVEL UP a wide range of leadership skills:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 483. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today I want to talk about making friends at work.
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
This is kind of a, like, full circle moment because I love talking about female friendships in particular and like making friends as a grown woman. In fact, if any of you are listeners from way back in my SMINTY days, my days co-hosting the Stuff Mom Never Told You podcast, you'll recall that the very first episode that Bridget Todd and I produced is called Can We Be Friends?
And it was kind of a double entendre because we were asking our listeners who we inherited from the show's originators, if we could be their new friends, you know, if they'd invite us into their earbuds with open arms. And we also talked about how hard it is to make friends as a grown woman in particular, and how important female friendships are to your health and well being, which is really unique and interesting.
But today I'm interested in looking at the dynamics of friends at work. The good, the bad, and the ugly. So, while there's a lot of good reasons to make friends wherever the h*** you can, when you're an adult, things can get complicated when it comes to work friendships in particular. So, today I want to talk about how to proceed with caution and just mindfulness around work friendships.
What's interesting is that a good number of studies have shown developing work friendships can enhance your overall happiness and productivity. So there's a good reason to do this. And Gallup in particular has repeatedly shown having best friends at work is key to employee engagement and job success. So that sounds good. We like that, right? Employees who have a best friend at work are significantly more likely to engage customers and internal partners, get more done in less time, support a safe workplace, innovate and share ideas, and just have fun while at work. All of which sounds lovely.
And I think it's really important to understand and kind of be proactive about potential conflicts. So are you friends with someone who you'll work closely with on projects together, or someone who you just see in the hallways, who's in a totally different department, who you eat lunch with every day, but you otherwise don't really work on the same work product? Do you have friends at work who have different amounts of power and authority than you do? And has that always been the case or has that changed over time?
So basically, whenever pursuing friendships at work, boundaries are going to be key, like being proactive about setting boundaries around what the relationship looks like. Maybe if it's just a verbal conversation at one point where you're clear about trying to keep your work relationship somewhat separate and distinct from your friendship, or being mindful that your friendship doesn't make it awkward or prevent you from having serious work conversations when necessary. Even just a little conversation up front can be really, really helpful to sort of head things off ahead of time.
The second thing to keep in mind here is making sure your friendship isn't totally and only centered around work. Everybody loves a gripe session, right? Where you can vent to somebody about work on occasion. But if that's all your friendship kind of devolves into, then, I don't know. I think it can be a slippery slope into a really cynical and negative conversation, Particularly if someone sees a future for themselves at this place of employment and, you know, one other person in the friendship doesn't. So making sure that work isn't the center of your friendship and the only thing you talk about all the time can be really helpful to making sure that you have a sustainable friendship over the long term. Otherwise, I have seen plenty of work friendships just implode and kind of go away completely after the two folks stop working together for whatever reason, because there just wasn't more of a relationship outside of work to keep it going. So don't be afraid to bring your work friendship home or on the weekends, or introduce, you know, each other to each other's lives outside of work, because that will help sustain your friendship over time if it's important to you to do that.
But the real complicated part of work friendships, if we're being real with each other, here, is what happens when power dynamics shift. So there's some interesting research around what happens when you are promoted or your work friend is promoted and the other party is not. ResumeLab surveyed more than a thousand employees to uncover insights on how people transition from workplace peers and friends to one of them being another's manager. And nearly 44% of people that they surveyed said they or a friend became the other's supervisor.
So this is a very common instance that if you haven't experienced it yet, odds are you will experience a new power dynamic with a work friend that can really complicate things. Fully 50% of the respondents admitted feeling jealous over their friend's promotion. But then afterwards, like later on when they were surveyed, almost 70% said that their friendship stayed the same. So that's the good news. There might be an initial period of jealousy, resentment, frustration, or even just confusion. But then almost 70% of those friendships do recover and kind of return to some new normal state. In fact, even 14% reported that the relationship improved after one of them was promoted. So that's really interesting.
But if you're the one being promoted, this can also put you in some tricky territory because you don't want to be accused of favoritism, right? And so if you're all of a sudden managing a team that you used to be on yourself, that alone is hard to establish authority. But especially if you've got a bestie on that team, odds are that everyone else knows that she's your bestie, right? Or he's your bestie. And so really establishing authority over this new team is what those surveyed said was their greatest challenge. 38% of people who were promoted said that that was their greatest challenge, followed by resolving conflict another 31%, and reprimanding another 30%, and then coaching. So almost 37% of new managers felt undermined by a workplace friend, and 16% confessed that they had actively undermined their new boss. Wow.
So it can really complicate things. It can spoil a friendship altogether, but it can also undermine your authority if people think that you are treating others unfairly. There's some really good, interesting research out of LSC, the London School of Economics, on cronyism from bosses who are friends with their subordinates. And essentially what that is is just favoritism, right? If employees feel decisions are made on closeness rather than performance, workplace friendships can mitigate the meritocratic ideal of organizations. In other words, if people feel like you're just giving your bestie the best assignments, the best shifts, the best opportunities, the best feedback because you're friends with them, and likability trumps meritocracy or performance, then it really erodes trust in a broad and widespread way, across the organization.
So essentially, what these researchers Pearce back in 2015, Shaheen in 2020, and Vickers et al in 2020 are saying is to be mindful of the boss-friend gap. Vickers et al writes, it's especially important for managers to ensure that friendships do not lead to favoritism and biased decision making. This requires a candid approach to work-play boundaries, ensuring that benefits are conferred equitably among the team. For example, invite the entire team to lunch. No exclusions, as opposed to just those that you're friendly with.
This reminds me so much of that season in The Office when James Spader comes in as the new boss, Robert California, and they find the list where he's got this, like, vertical line written down the page. And on one side of that line there's a bunch of names, and on the other side of the line there's a bunch of names. And he starts basically inviting a certain group of office workers into his office to, like, brainstorm together, to go out to lunch together. And then other people get left behind. And this favoritism of, like, there being an in crowd and an out crowd becomes the subject of an entire episode that is truly delightful.
So basically, what these researchers are saying, and this is true for a friendship, or just favoritism in group dynamics as well, is that you really want to avoid even the perception of unfair treatment, which is hard because I think it's fair to say that we're all humans. And likability, unfortunately, does matter, as women know all too well and women of color know especially well, that we don't operate in a perfect meritocracy. But when you're doing things like performance reviews on a friend of yours or for a friend of yours, you better make sure you've got a hiring rubric, a performance review process in place, and something that really feels like an airtight set of tools to guide your process. Because if things get way too casual, you are going to undermine the entire culture of your team. Your integrity will be questioned, your competency will be questioned as a leader yourself. So whether you're the one who got promoted or you're in a friendship with someone where someone else got promoted and you're left feeling resentful, this can be really complicated.
There's so many different ways that we could talk more about this, but I really want to hear from you. How do you navigate workplace friendships? Have you had a work wife or a work bestie? And how's that worked out over time? What happens when one of you gets promoted and the other one doesn't? What happens when someone leaves the company for a new job elsewhere? Like, does the friendship survive? I would love to hear from you and keep this conversation going as always in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up LinkedIn Group. And if you are someone who's looking to advance in your career with or without a work bestie, be sure to check out LEVEL UP our six month leadership development program for women on the rise who want to refine and hone their leadership and management skills.
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It's certainly complicated, especially when you intersect leadership with likability and friendships in the workplace. But they can peacefully coexist. Until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose and together let's lift as we climb.
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